


the mark mcpherson effect

by zauberer_sirin



Series: Confessions [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, First Kiss, Love Confessions, Phil Coulson: human disaster, Realization, Romance, Unresolved Romantic Tension, don't mind the summary Daisy is perfectly alive and well, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-09
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-08-14 03:02:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7996165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Daisy dies Coulson falls in love with her picture.</p><p>(Part 1 of a series of fics about Coulson and Daisy confessing their feelings in different ways.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the mark mcpherson effect

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nausicaa_of_phaeacia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nausicaa_of_phaeacia/gifts).



> As you might have guessed from the title this is somewhat based on the movie "Laura" and the idea of falling in love with the picture of a dead woman.

It happens because he is looking at her pictures when the strike team comes back and the news start spreading through the base. It’s a recent picture, she keeps changing her hair. She is smiling in the picture, and Coulson is still trying to understand that smile when he first hears what happened.

The news also spread fast. Some people are celebrating (the new team, the ones whose mission these past few months has been as single-minded as Coulson’s), some are in shock, numb. May is comforting Agent Piper but who’s comforting her. The Director warns everybody not to speak to the press yet, until it’s official, until they put a stamp on the mission report. He looks triumphant in a way that makes Coulson sick to his stomach and he stares back to the picture of her he was analyzing (or just staring at) and he knows Daisy herself would have been appalled, if she was here and this was someone else, an Inhuman just trying to help her people. Coulson knows exactly, the face Daisy would make if she was here, he knows how principled fury looks on her. Looked on her.

He and Mack review the footage from the explosion. Inconclusive, but only because he wants it to be, and there have been many witnesses anyway.

Hours later and Mack is convinced she’s still alive.

“It just looks very convenient, doesn’t it?” he says, desperate for Coulson to agree with him.

Coulson lifts his weight from one feet to the other. They are waiting outside the Director’s office, waiting for a debrief on the matter, after a couple of other groups have already been officially informed. He and Mack are not even priority when it comes to Daisy Johnson’s death.

“That’s confirmation bias,” Coulson tells him. “Everything you see will serve to support your theory that she’s still alive.”

Mack gives him a hard, almost angry look. Mack’s anger is very effective, because he’s such a soft person. Coulson is grateful he is the one believing in Daisy against all odds - so he doesn’t have to. It would hurt too much, he prefers the role of the skeptic this time, it’s safer.

After the meeting he prints out a copy of that last picture (that last proper picture, there are more, from today, of her going into the building, never coming out) and takes it home with him.

 

+

 

For days and days it’s easy to find him looking at the picture, like there’s a secret message to be decodified. About who Daisy was. But also about himself, about what it means for him to be looking at Daisy like this, what it always meant.

The smile on the picture makes him wonder if he ever made her smile. He should have tried more often. _She_ made him smile, even when he didn’t allow himself to show it on his face, and he should have told her that. It’s useless, if she really is dead. She never knew he was secretly smiling when she talked.

He only tears his eyes from it because May needs a drink.

She pours generously, like when they were in the Academy and she, younger but braver than him, taught him to drink, taught him to take it on the chin. He can do that with now, and he doubts it’ll work for May either.

The first drink they spend in silence. His mind is somewhere else. On the photograph - on the smile that was simultaneously comforting (she was okay, she wasn’t in despair, she could smile the rare genuine smile that you didn’t often get out of Daisy) and troubling, sad. Because it was over, because there hadn’t been more of it. 

Coulson is fidgety, like he has a secret he’s afraid May will discover. Which, that’s kind of case.

“I’ve been there,” she says.

Coulson feels shame. She has, and quite recently. And May, she had a real thing.

“Don’t do that to yourself,” she says, cryptically, she could mean anything, and pours herself another drink,but not him.

Next morning she looks tired, but she shows up to keep training the strike team. There’s a lot of inertia in what they are all doing right now, until the fact starts to hit them. He doesn’t know what Simmons is doing locked in her lab all day. He knows Mack is just waiting, waiting for her to come back.

Coulson thinks about Daisy’s sharp features (he met her when her cheeks had been rounder, fuller, but her eyes betrayed the same resolve as now, the mutable unchanging Daisy and Skye) and remembers his favorite assignment for English class when he was a teenager, the words that stuck with him, “a lean and hungry look” and that’s how Daisy seems in the picture and it’s a good look.

She is wearing her leather jacket, the one she had from before they met, and underneath a dark green sweater he doesn’t recognize. She must have bought if _after_. It makes sense, she only took one bag with her when she left. But it also means something, it implies a life where she has to buy clothes, a life that is dangerous and fragile and possibly lonely, but a life of her own, a life that is not SHIELD’s.

 

+

 

She was smiling in the picture.

Surveillance camera but the quality is far better than anything they had caught until then. She kept visiting the Hintons, finding new ways, new places to meet. Coulson has no idea how she got the messages across - but maybe the fact that the Hintons bought a dog has something to do with it.

The camera caught her either going to visit the Polly and Robin or right after the meeting finished. Either way she’s smiling.

It’s like she’s a person Coulson doesn’t know.

She looks beautiful.

That’s not something he knew when she was alive. That she was beautiful. Maybe cerebrally. He could admire the way she used her looks to get a mark sometimes. He didn’t know she was beautiful. Filed away with the first impression, a footnote, a “pretty girl living on her own in a van”, and then soon he discovered so many impressive attributes about her that being aware of her handsomeness felt like a betrayal.

And she was too young for him to be in love with her.

Not that it matter now. She’ll never get old. He’ll never get over it. It’s almost liberating. Except she had some way of knowing. He didn’t but he wishes he could tell her now.

“What are you doing? Don’t fall in love with dead people,” he tells himself in the dark in his flat. He thinks he’s heard that line in a movie, but it’s good advice.

If she really is dead (and Coulson is not ready to join Mack’s hopes - in a way despair is easier to palate in this case, it’s not even the first time, once an ancient Kree temple fell on top of her and Coulson thought that was it, he didn’t have hope either) what does it all matter anyway. And he thinks it’s almost a matter of pride: she was here, she was loved.

 

+

 

He falls asleep looking at her picture, like in an old movie. He knows because he wakes up in a panic thinking he lost it, only to find is resting on his lap, where it had slipped to from his fingers when he fell asleep. In the darkness of his apartment he only half makes out Daisy’s image, but he knows it by heart. 

When he looks up from the picture he sees someone in the hallway.

SHIELD training should have kicked in upon having a stranger who has clearly broken into, but he stays sitting, nailed to the spot, because Daisy is the intruder. For a moment he wonders if he’s been looking at her picture for so long that the image is superimposing over what really is in front of him. He doesn’t move, because if that’s the case he doesn’t want the visual effect to dissolve.

The intruder moves, though, and Coulson realizes she is really here.

“You look like you have seen a ghost,” she says.

Coulson pulls back a choking sound, between a sob and a chuckle. 

Daisy takes a step forward. “No, sorry, that wasn’t funny.”

He inches forward in his chair, too, and the picture of her falls to the floor.

“You were-”

“I had to,” she interrupts. Coulson can’t believe he is hearing her voice, after all this time. That’s what the picture could never give him, her voice. If he thinks about it her voice was the first thing about her he thought remarkable, back when he didn’t even know her. Hearing it now - it makes everything unravel for him. He didn’t fall in love with a picture, this is all old news. Daisy walks up to him, until she is right by his side. The upset in her face, even in these shadows. “I’m so sorry, I couldn’t - I swear I’m going to explain everything to you, and you’ll un-”

Something on Coulson’s expression stops her words, and he wonders what it is. He used to be very good at keeping himself in check. Now he feels no control over anything, anything at all.

He opens his mouth, still incredulous that he can just be here, talking to this woman.

“I know whatever reason you had, it was a good one, but…”

He reaches out in the darkness, wrapping one arm around Daisy’s waist and pulls her against him.

He should have held her more often, so often that he would be able to tell if she has lost weight these past seven months just by touching her.

Now he holds her so tight and he presses his face so hard against her stomach. Daisy freezes for a moment, then she relaxes and lets Coulson cling to her like this. He can’t help it, he’s so _afraid_. Afraid that she’ll go away again, of course. But more than anything he’s afraid that now she is here and alive he will never tell her all the things he wants to tell her.

He sobs quietly into the fabric of Daisy’s sweater, wondering if the green one, until it’s not quietly anymore.

“I know, I know,” she whispers, her voice soft like as if she were cuddling a small child. She runs her fingers through Coulson’s hair repeatedly. “I missed you too.”

 

+

 

It’s the first really dangerous mission since she’s come back. Not the first dangerous one, but the first scary-dangerous one. The first one where the odds are slightly more stacked against them than usual.

“Hey, you okay?” Daisy asks him, which is absurd, because she is the one marching off to face a group of superpowered villains. “You look pale.”

He feels sick. He wonders: did it always feel like this? He thinks he has forgotten, for a moment but _Yes, it always felt like this_ , he just never told her.

He drops his chin. He lets out a tiny chuckle, shaking his head at himself.

“I don’t know how I can do this,” he says.

Daisy freezes. Just in time so that he can see it.

“Are you- are you asking me not to do this?”

He shakes his head again, more resolved this time. He would never do that to her, and it’s not what his fear is about. She died once (more than once but who’s counting - he’s counting, he’s counting every time she dies and he doesn’t make it count) and she never knew...

“I could never do that,” he tells her. “I just wanted you to know.”

“Know what?”

“Know what?” she asks, searching his eyes. He can never tell when he is genuinely clueless or just incredibly unassuming. In retrospect, Coulson doesn’t think he has been subtle, especially that night she came back.

Things have gotten more normal since then, more awkward too, both of them pulling back at the same time, like they’re in sync. 

It’s not the most dangerous mission she has faced, it’s just enough of a reminder of her numbered days that it feels like an electric current through him, enough that it pulls the veil of complacency of the last few weeks aside.

He wraps his hand around her upper arm but he knows he has made this gesture before. It’s not enough. He has always stopped at the edge of what was true. He lifts his hand, touching his fingertips against her cheek. But he has made this gesture before, too. He need to keep all that bravery and wisdom he had when he believed she was dead. Daisy is alive. Isn’t that worth risking everything?

She turns her head, pressing her cheek to his palm, half-closing her eyes for a moment. Coulson steps back for a moment, his whole body gripped by old versions of himself. That fear is actually the push he needs. He steps forward again, almost falling into his own movements (and wouldn’t that be fitting?) and touches his mouth, carefully, to hers.

Her lips are dry, the kiss barely lasts long enough to be considered a kiss. He is too scared to linger longer, stepping back with a sharp, sobered breath, as if just realizing what he has just done.

He is scared of meeting her eyes but she is right in front of her - she has always been that, inevitably unavoidable. He had tried to not look, but...

Daisy gives him a little nod, then turns to finish the preparations for the mission. The Quinjet ramp opens, a shaft of light piercing the space. They switch the comms on and Daisy grabs her backpack.

“Ready,” she says, and headquarters confirm the connection. Coulson realizes they are both just agents now, on the same level, and he is no one’s boss anymore.

She sets her watch. “See you in a couple of hours.”

Coulson nods.

He thought the kiss might upset her, or that she’d leave confused. But when they open the ramp and Daisy takes off to face danger, scary-danger, she turns around for a moment (she swirls more like it, one graceful continuous movement) and gives Coulson and little smile.


End file.
